The article is mainly drivel, but as far as suicide goes anyone even remotely in the know realizes that males are more likely to kill themselves than women, though women attempt more. Women succeed in killing themselves less frequently because they use less reliable (violent) methods. Men tend to shoot or hang themselves, women go for pills. The highest rate of suicide is in older men (I’m thinking 45+, but don’t remember exactly and don’t want to look it up).
The article or essay or whatever mentions that men die earlier because of risk taking behaviors, but then disregards it and rants away as if the age-at-death differential is due entirely to societal disinterest in male health. Hardly. Men much more frequently die in their teens and early twenties because they ARE risk-takers. It impacts the statistics. Period. He mentions–along with the higher suicide rate–the murder rate for men. But again, blithely ignores its meaning as pertains to the difference in life expectancy.
He spends a great deal of energy on the Violence Against Women Act of 1994. But changes in 2005 include a focus on gender-neutrality (Garrine, 2007). However, men benefitted directly from the VAWA even before the changes in '05: “According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) the number of female victims of domestic partner violence dropped nearly fifty percent from 1993 to 2001, going from 1.1 million documented cases to less than 600,000 incidents in eight years. The number of men murdered by intimate and former partners has dropped even more precipitously. There’s been a seventy percent reduction since 1976 (Prah, 2006).”
Cool, huh? The VAWA has caused a drop in male deaths.
The time he spends griping about breast cancer and the Susan G. Komen foundation made me laugh. WOMEN did that for themselves, not men. Men didn’t give, WOMEN did. Women went out half dead of cancer with their little bandanas covering their chemo-balded heads and shuffled 3.2 miles through city streets with their friends while daughters clapped and husbands tried not to look embarrassed. Other women, sympathetic (as women can tend to be) supported it, emotionally and then, eventually, financially. At its inception, it was almost exclusively women. Now? According to your essayist “more than 184 corporate sponsors including 3M, 7-Eleven, Ask.com, Belkin, BMW, Coffee-Mate, Cross Pens, Dell, Dove Chocolates, Dr Pepper/Snapple, Energizer Batteries, Evian, Frederick’s of Hollywood, GUESS, Hallmark, Hanes, Hewlett-Packard, Huggies, Kitchen Aid, Kyocera, LPGA, Lowe’s, Microsoft, NAPA auto care, NBC Today Show, Purina, Nordstrom, Oreck, Payless shoes, Pepperidge Farm, Perdue Farms, Pier One, Princess Cruises, Quilted Northern, REMAX, Clorox, Tracfone, Victorinox Swiss Army, Chapstick, Yahoo, and even the Zeta Tau Alpha Fraternity” are interested in cashing in on the advertising gold mine the pink ribbon affords. That’s not men giving, that’s men accessing opportunity.
Eh, whatever. The rest of it is so whining and victimized, I can’t even be bothered. Women “augmenting their sexual power” with breast implants is an indication of male victimization? LOL